by Holly Lisle
Barney said, “You didn’t tuck us in.”
Jamie said, “Barney said you gave him some candy. You didn’t give me any candy, and besides, it was just a trick. You can’t really do magic, either.”
Ergrawll looked from Jamie to Barney, then back to Jamie again. “Of course I can’t do magic. No one can.” She smiled, then turned her back on them and switched off the light. “You’ll have to tuck yourselves in tonight. I don’t tuck in.”
“Can you sing bedtime songs?” Jamie asked
“No. I don’t do those either.”
“What kind of baby-sitter are you?” Jamie demanded.
Ergrawll’s shape filled the doorway. “A carnivorous one,” she said. “Go to sleep.” Then she closed the door and was gone.
Barney sat on the edge of the bed in the darkness, growing angry. “She lied to us.” He stared at the shadowshapes of his feet, barely visible in the faint light cast by the tiny moons out the window. He kicked his feet and said it again, a bit louder.
Beside him, Jamie whispered soft, meaningless words. “Carnivorous,” his brother said. “That’s bad.”
Barney didn’t know what “craniferroots” were, and he didn’t care. “She lied to us,” he told his brother.
Jamie said, “Huh?”
“Ergrawll lied to us. About the magic. I saw her do it.”
“You always fall for those stupid tricks.” His brother’s voice made fun of him.
“I saw how she did it. She made her hands into a circle, and did this funny, twisty thing in her head—” Barney acted out the monster’s actions as he talked. “And then she thought ‘candy,’ and tasted it when she thought it... and smelled it, too.”
Barney stared at the space between his hands, where thousands of tiny firefly lights suddenly shimmered and twinkled. His heart pounded as he watched. Beside him, he heard Jamie gasp. The firefly lights died, and something smooth and heavy and cool lay in the palm of his left hand — a block of something he just knew was wonderful. He tightened his grip around the firefly gift and lay back on the pillow. Slowly, he put the corner of the block into his mouth. He nibbled the tiniest piece of the corner away.
It was good chocolate. Better even than the monster’s chocolate. Barney smiled into the darkness and waited.
“What happened?” Jamie finally asked. “What were those lights in your hands?”
Barney took a bigger bite of the chocolate. “Nuffing,” he said around the mouthful of candy.
“What do you have in your mouth?” Jamie’s voice was edged with deep suspicion. “Let me see.” He got out of the bed and came over to look.
Barney shoved as much of the chocolate as would fit into his mouth. He wrapped his fingers tightly around what remained.
Jamie started prying his fingers apart. “Share,” he hissed.
“You said there wasn’t any magic. So there isn’t any candy.”
Somewhere in the castle, well away from their room, someone screamed — a piercing, anguished scream that went on and on, becoming gradually softer and more pleading, until at last it gurgled to a horrible stop.
Jamie froze at the sound of it, and Barney’s fingers dropped the sticky remains of the chocolate to the castle’s cold stone floor.
“What was that?” Jamie whispered.
In the hall, Barney could now hear the sounds of fighting — and of dying. He shivered. “You won’t believe me.”
“Yes, I will.”
“You know the bad things that came after us before.”
“Yeah. I know.”
“Something’s comin’ after us again — and this one’s worse.”
Barney heard his brother suck in his breath. Then Jamie said, “You know how you kept the ghost away until you ran out of the closet?”
“Batman kept him away.”
“Okay — yeah, I forgot. Batman. Okay. So — can you get Batman to keep this one away?”
Barney looked at the darker outline in the darkness that was his brother, and shook his head in disbelief. “Batman doesn’t live here.”
“I know. But couldn’t you, like, make a Bat-signal or something to call him? Pretty fast?”
Barney sat silent, thinking.
“Isn’t there something you can do? Barn? C’mon...” Jamie sounded scared.
Barney hopped down from the bed and felt his way across the room to Carol’s bed. It was funny there were no monsters under the beds in the castle, he thought. He decided it was because they were all out in the halls, fighting off the thing that was coming.
He hopped onto Carol’s bed, and Jamie imitated him.
Barney held out his hands and closed his eyes. He found what he needed in his imagination — felt the cool plastic, saw the bright green, the splashes of orange and red and blue and purple. The Turtles. In his mind’s eye, he saw them bigger — giant-sized, grown-up sized, wielding their weapons.
Something began to shimmer in front of him. Outside the door — right outside the door — there was another of those horrible screams. Something scrabbled on the wood, thudded heavily. “No!” it howled — she howled. “You can’t take them!”
The door blew open — splintered. Light rolled into the room, hazy and swirling, centered on the monster woman who fought to hold back something infinitely worse. The light rippled over her, licked along her body greasily, sucked her dry and devoured her. She threw a weapon at the horror in the hallway — a desperate move — then fell. The light that crawled over her flickered brighter, and her body withered, and her scream grew fainter and fainter, as if she were falling down a deep hole. The silence swallowed her scream. The smoky light licked along the stain on the floor where she had lain, then guttered out.
Jamie screamed. Carol woke up, opened her eyes, then buried her head under her pillow. Murp, curled up sleeping with Carol, woke, and arched his back and hissed.
Barney shuddered, his summoning of the Turtles forgotten.
Something stepped into the room — a blast of dank, stinking, freezing air; the rattle of bones; two gleaming blood-red eyes that glowed but threw no light.
The eyes stared at the spot where Ergrawll had fallen. Then slowly, slowly, the shadow of a head turned, and the eyes searched out the corner of the room where the children crouched, trapped. Barney wished himself invisible, or gone.
But the eyes found him — found them all. He felt the thing smile, though he could not see it.
“So here you are,” it said. It looked at them, through them, and Barney, frightened, cried out. Its voice was soft, just a whisper, only the hint of a voice — more terrible for being so quiet. “Good. Now you will come with me.”
CHAPTER 6
A man came to Minerva in her dream, walking along a dark and twisting tunnel, and he smiled. The smile seemed, in that darkness, bigger than the man.
He looks like Santa Claus, she thought. I wonder why I made him look like that.
She knew she was dreaming, and that surprised her. She decided to see what she could do while she slept. She reshaped the rotund, jovial man, stretching him long and thin and pulling his nose out until it could have put Cyrano de Bergerac’s to shame. She giggled.
“Don’t do that,” the man snapped, and shifted himself back into his Santa Claus form. “It isn’t dignified.”
She made his ears large, huge, enorrrrrmous — she made them flap like Dumbo’s.
“I said don’t do that.” He changed his ears back and sat on a rock in the tunnel — except it wasn’t a rock in the tunnel. As soon as he sat on it, it became a white-painted cast-iron seat in a restaurant, and all the waiters were cheymats and blue dragons. She and Santa Claus were seated in a booth that was decorated with a red-and-green checked tablecloth, and the food was already on the table. The drinks were vivid blue, the vegetables gelatinous and purple. Little roast beasts lay on a huge china serving platter, singing. Their voices sounded like Alvin and the Chipmunks. When she listened closer, she realized the song they were singing was White Christmas.
Santa picked up one of the beasts and took a bite out of it. It sang louder, its voice becoming a shrill squeal. Minerva stared, fascinated. It kept singing — and even when Santa had reduced it to a pile of bones, she could hear its piping little voice echoing from the man’s belly.
“Ho! Ho! Ho!” Santa shouted, and his belly heaved and shuddered — and split apart, like a zipper unzipping.
“Surprise,” a soft, hollow voice whispered. “It isn’t Christmas after all.” Santa’s flesh peeled back like a coat flung to the floor, and a creature obscured by the deep folds of a cowled cloak pushed Santa’s bleached white ribs apart and stepped out. From the shadowed depths of the black cowl, two red lights glowed like hellfires.
“Hello, Minerva. I’m the Unweaver,” the nightmare said. “Fancy meeting you in a place like this.”
Minerva suddenly felt queasy.
The roast beasts were singing the helium-induced version of Silent Night.
“What do you want?” she asked. Her voice quavered.
“I want nothing. In fact, I have several things I don’t want. Perhaps you can take them off my hands.” The Unweaver laughed and held out skeletal hands. Sitting astride the carpal bones were her three children, all the size of mice.
“Mom,” they screamed, in tiny, squeaking voices that were almost drowned out by the roast beasts. “Mommy, save us!”
Minerva grabbed for her children. Her hands hit the Unweaver’s, and his bones fell apart. Her children toppled to the floor of the restaurant.
The Unweaver fixed her in his burning gaze. “Naughty, naughty,” he rasped. “Can’t have them back now.” He put his bones back on, caught her children without moving, and popped them into his cowl at the place where she guessed his mouth would be.
“No!” Minerva yelled, and reached across the table to strangle him She wanted to rip him to shreds, to tear him bone from bone, until she found her children. But no matter how far she stretched he was just beyond her reach. He slipped away from her down a tunnel that suddenly appeared in the restaurant, streaming backward like a man falling down a hole. He faced her — not mooing, but still becoming smaller and smaller — with her children screaming from somewhere inside his bones. Then the two red dots of his eyes winked out and he was gone.
“Give me back my kids, you son of a bitch!” she roared.
You better not pout, you better not cry, you better not shout, sang the roast beasts. I’m tellin’ you why. Santa Claus is coming to town.
* * *
She opened her eyes. Wow! What a nightmare.
Something smelled wonderful — and from down the hall she could hear hooves on hardwood. “He’s makin’ a list, and checking it twice,” a pleasant baritone sang. Apparently Talleos was fixing breakfast. She sat up and took a deep breath.
“It is a stone bitch,” she muttered, “when reality is just as bizarre as your dreams.”
She got dressed. Talleos had given her another set of clothes — again a heavily embroidered long baggy tunic with embroidered belt, wrap-type leather pantaloons, and an embroidered vest in crayon colors. She was apparently stuck with the curly-toed purple boots.
They can’t all dress like this, she thought. But then, they didn’t all dress like that. At least one of them didn’t dress at all. She winced and pulled on the loud clothes and the awful — but comfortable — purple boots, then went down the hall to breakfast.
He was grilling meat and eggs and big round slices of something maroon. “Healths of the day to you,” he declared, and flipped the eggs in the air with a deft twist of his wrist. He crumbled green and red powder onto them, then tossed the maroon things. He seemed entirely too cheerful. “Grab a plate. Sleep well?”
“Good morning, I guess. Fine except for the nightmares.” She grabbed one of the heavy blue stoneware plates and a fork — looks like solid silver, she mused — and he piled half of his feast onto it for her.
“Nightmares... hmmm—” He loaded up his own plate and trotted into the breakfast nook. “Sometimes nightmares can be very deep and meaningful — interpreted correctly, of course.” Muted sunlight came through the oilskin coverings and burnished everything with its glow. She noticed that both his eyes were black where she’d tried to take them out with her thumbs, and he had a huge bruise on his throat. She decided it would be prudent not to mention this.
They sat, and at his urging she told him about her dream.
When she’d finished, he sat quietly, staring off into space. She waited, trying to figure out what he was thinking from the expression on his face, and to see if he’d found any rich symbolism in her dream.
Finally he shook his head and looked into her eyes. “You ever do drugs?” he asked.
Caught off guard, she burst out laughing. “I’ve always had nightmares. I figured that was bad enough.”
“Yeah. Dreams like that — drugs would be redundant.” He shook his head again, chuckled, and dug into his breakfast.
She stuffed her face with the maroon slabs. They were wonderful, whatever they were. Rich and salty and starchy-crunchy on the outside, chewy on the inside. The exercise from the day before still seemed to be affecting her. She was starved. “So you don’t think the dream had any deep significance?”
“Sure it did. You’re worried about your kids. Doesn’t take a master magician to figure that out.”
Minerva was disappointed. She’d hoped Talleos would have some wondrous explanation for the dream — it was odd enough it seemed to call for one. And it had, at the time, seemed so real.
That was the end of conversation until they’d both finished eating. Then, however, Talleos said “Speaking of master magicians — you have a lot to accomplish today. We’re going to start your magic lessons.”
They dumped their dishes on the kitchen counter; then he led her to a heavy, brass-bound door just off the library.
“The workroom,” he said, and gave her a courtly, half-mocking bow. He opened the door for her, and she walked in.
Her first reaction was, “You have to be kidding.” The rest of the house had been so modern, so normal — that somehow she had expected the magic room to be more of the same. Pragmatic. Sensible.
It was anything but.
Huge, dusty tomes and scrolls and rolls of parchment bent the bookcase shelves along the far wall into inverted arches. Display cases along both side walls held bottles and jars and amphorae and phials, skulls and hides, half-melted candles, tiny figurines and nondescript bundles of dead plants and other scruffy things. She sidled leftward, edging cautiously past what she would have described as a stuffed devil. She wasn’t entirely sure it was stuffed — hence the caution. She wanted a closer look at the jars and other paraphernalia. Talleos flipped a switch, and the interiors of the display cases lit up.
She turned one cork-stoppered jar so she could see past the label. The jar contained thick, gray, meaty things floating in a pale green solution.
“Tongue of the fabled flightless guerfowl — used in spells relating to speaking or singing.” Talleos sounded disgustingly enthusiastic when he said that. She peeked back at him. He was grinning broadly.
Minerva wrinkled her nose. She couldn’t imagine herself enthused about dead bird tongues. But you never know, she thought.
She moved another container and peered through the murky, colorless fluid to discover it was chock full of what looked like the body parts of small reptiles.
“Fetal dragon,” the cheymat told her. “Already sectioned. It’s powerful stuff — most spells won’t call for more than a leg or an eye.”
“Oh, yuck.”
A third held long, thin, looping coils of something smooth and pale blue.
“Oh, that is great stuff,” Talleos said, and sighed.
“Oh?” Minerva didn’t trust Talleos for an assessment of what was great.
“Absolutely. It’s an aphrodisiac. Penis of crested kirmin — a kirmin’s penis grows from thirty to forty feet long. That one is a better than average sp
ecimen.”
“Oh, gross!” She turned away, and almost ran into a little worktable upon which sat an alembic. The glass apparatus was full of noxious, gloppy green liquid on one side, and something brown covered with a coat of fuzzy mold on the other. “Eeeuw!” She looked back at Talleos, who wore a sweet smile.
The center of the room was clear. On the heavy wooden floor a circle had been painted with green, red, yellow, blue, and black paint. The geometric figure painted inside the circle had ten points, each of a different color.
“That’s the decagram,” Talleos said. “It will be your work center.”
“I thought the pentagram was the magical symbol.”
Talleos snorted. “A common but anthropocentric misconception. The pentagram became popular because a man, with arms and legs spread, could imitate one. Hermetic philosophers — who thought the universe circled Man the way the sun circled the Earth — found this profound and significant.”
“The sun doesn’t circle the Earth.”
“So true. Nor the universe Man.” Talleos clicked across the floor, his hooves tapping loudly. He pointed to the decagram. “The unicursal decagram, however, represents each of the possible emanations between the world of Knowledge and the world of the Unknowable Infinite.”
Minerva twitched an eyebrow upward. “How fascinating that the Unknowable Infinite is reachable by such an easy number as ten.”
Talleos frowned at her. “Even the Unknowable Infinite is within the reach of the true seeker. As you will discover.”
He pulled a black robe off a coathook and handed it to Minerva. “Wear this. It is fitting garb for a seeker and future magus such as yourself.”
She struggled her way into the garment with difficulty. The robe draped down to the floor, the hem crumpled on the wood to form several folds of cloth around her feet. The sleeves enveloped her hands. They dangled well past her fingertips. The cowl hung over her face — hot and scratchy and uncomfortable. The robe must have been worn by a man seven feet tall, she thought.
“Don’t you have one smaller?”
Talleos gaped at her as though she had suggested profaning a temple. “Have one smaller? Are you kidding? That is the Sacred Robe of Exarp. There aren’t two of them.”
